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Comment by fwlr | Hacker News Reader

God’s been around for thousands of years and we are still here and flourishing, so obviously God is in some way “aligned”; the same cannot be said for AGI.

edit: Guys, I said “in some way”, not “perfectly”.

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Survivorship bias. Ask all the humans that have died in horrific screaming agony, and saw everything they worked for turned to dust how well that was aligned with their interests.

I have never heard survivorship bias applied to perspective on the goodness of God. Even as an agnostic, I'm enjoying the thought.

The Book of Job addresses this. Basically, it is God's prerogative to do whatever He wants with us. You don't have to like it, but He is still in charge.

In other words god may or may not be aligned with our interests, and if not you’d better just suck it up. Which is contrary to the argument that was being made regarding evidence for alignment.

1. Evidence from history is that god is kind and aligned with our interests. 2. Clearly palpably that’s not always the case. 3. Ok, but tough shit.

1 and 3 are not consistent.

Individual humans have died, but humanity hasn't. We can't confidently say AI will turn out the same for the next ten thousand years.

There's that, but also that if God exists, there's not anything we can do about it. About AI, we can. That gives us the responsibility to figure out the right direction.

If god would allow the creation of an unaligned superintelligence, how aligned is he really?

I read this in the voice of Cypher from The Matrix.

Which I think makes me Neo? So at least if my company folds from AI investment fallout, I can still have a destiny.

There it still is. Blind faith in the system.

Tell that to all the heretics burned at the stake.

This little blue marble of Earth is an as-yet undiscovered anti-entropic bug in an otherwise accurately functioning entropy-respectingly beautiful wasteland of a universe.

I'm sorry by I'm stealing this

... with my blessings

The lands and seas have been around before us, and will continue to flourish after us and everything we hold dear, like God.

There's no alignment except the arrow of entropy.

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